Yonkers Doodle

Until a decade ago, harness racing was a minor, pastoral sport, largely confined to county fairgrounds and camptown tracks. Then the trotters were brought to the big city, presented to the racing public at night in big, new floodlighted tracks, and built up to a major sporting enterprise. Today harness racing is a $430 million-a-year business, the fastest-growing spectator sport in the U.S. With so much money and public interest, it was almost inevitable that the bumpkin sport would catch the eye of big-city racketeers. Last week in New York, as a major harness-racing scandal unfolded, Governor Thomas E. Dewey ordered an investigation of racketeering at the raceways.

The trouble centered around Yonkers Raceway, the nation's leading harness track, where million-dollar nights at the parimutuel windows are commonplace, and spectators outnumber the fans at Ebbets Field.

Last August, Labor Boss Thomas F. Lewis was murdered outside his Bronx apartment by a hired gunman who was killed, in turn, by a policeman. Lewis was president of Local 32-E of the A.F.L.'s Building Service Employes' Union, which had free rein at Yonkers Raceway.

Trouble Insurance. Lewis, it turned out, had run Yonkers Raceway as though he owned it. The management meekly agreed to hire hoodlums and ex-convicts brought in by Lewis and ignored the state law requiring sworn affidavits outlining their backgrounds. In the three years that Yonkers Raceway has been operating, the management also shelled out $165,000 to four labor "troubleshooters." The payoffs were made to prevent "labor disturbances" which might close the track.

Press and public clamored for the answers to two questions: i) Why had the New York State Harness Racing Commission done nothing about the violation of the regulations? and 2) Who were the owners who submitted to Lewis' dictatorship? As the storm swirled up the Hudson to Albany, Governor Dewey acted promptly. First, he suspended the license of the Yonkers track (which was scheduled to open a 42-night fall meeting this week) until all 1,200 employees had submitted fingerprints and required statements.

Penny's Ante. The names of some of the owners of the Yonkers Raceway, meanwhile, were made public. Head of the Yonkers Trotting Association and owner of all voting stock is William H. Cane, 79, sportsman who built Boyle's Thirty Acres in Jersey City (scene of the Dempsey-Carpentier "Battle of the Century") and promoted the Hambletonian at his Goshen, N.Y. track as the nation's top annual harness race. Other stockholders included J. Russel Sprague, G.O.P. national committeeman, boss of Long Island's Nassau County and close friend of Governor Dewey; Dr. Richard Hoffman, best known as Frank Costello's psychiatrist; and Mrs. Jeanne Weiss, daughter of the late Democratic bigwig, Irwin Steingut.

Sprague got his 4,000 shares of Yonkers stock from Norman Penny, another Long Island Republican leader, in a unique time payment plan. The 1950 sale price was $20 a share; Sprague's dividends were $6 a share the first year, $8 a share the second. He completed payments in the spring of 1953 When the scandal broke, the stock was worth about $100 a share.

This week, as Dewey's investigators got to work on the Yonkers mess, the New York World-Telegram and Sun trotted out another scandal, this one at Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island. Labor bosses, the paper said, have been milking the paychecks of track employees for $345,000 a year; every Friday night, Roosevelt employees who wanted to keep their jobs hastened to a bar in nearby Hempstead and forked out cash tribute to the racketeers.' Some of the payments went for tickets to clambakes, but the rest of the money was simply handed over with no questions and no explanations.

Owner of the bar is William De Koning, onetime A.F.L. power and close friend of George Morton Levy, head of the Roosevelt Raceway. In 1951, Levy admitted to the Kefauver committee that he paid Frank Costello $60,000 over a four-year period to keep bookmakers out of the Roosevelt track. De Koning, it developed, is a capitalist of some dimensions as well as a big union man; he owns approximately $300,000 worth of stock in the Roosevelt and Yonkers tracks, has admitted yearly incomes as high as $125,000. De Koning resigned last May as chief of Long Island's construction unions, but continued as the unofficial labor leader at Roosevelt Raceway.

Immediate reaction to the Long Island revelations was a chorus of denial from the Roosevelt management and a flurry of subpoenas from the Nassau County district attorney's office.

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